This is the third of three diaries published this weekend which excerpt portions of my August 2000 report, "The Empire Strikes Back: Police Repression of Protest From Seattle To L.A.". This diary presents a more comprehensive account of what actually happened in Washington DC surrounding the anti-World Bank/IMF demonstrations, which resulted in the $13 million settlement announced last Monday.
Washington, D.C.
The A-16 demonstrations against the World Bank/IMF on April 16 and 17, 2000 saw a dramatic escalation in state repression of fundamental constitutional rights. There was a coordinated preemptive plan to stifle and disrupt constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly, which included a wide range of acts that were individually illegal, unconstitutional and/or actionable on civil law, including an illegal raid on the Convergence Center, the headquarters for groups involved in the protests, and the confiscation of property that prevented its use in the demonstrations.
On July 27, the ACLU, National Lawyers Guild and Partnership for Civil Justice filed a lawsuit covering all these activities on behalf of organizations and individuals involved in the protests, including Fifty Years is Enough, the International Action Center, and the Mobilization for Global Justice.
The suit contained 10 counts: One count for the conspiracy to disrupt First Amendment rights, one count for the raid on the Convergence Center, four for mass false arrest (First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, false arrest, false imprisonment), one for the exclusion ("No Constitution") zone, and three for excess force (First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, assault and battery).
The lawsuit charges that the conspiracy to disrupt First Amendment rights included "intimidation, harassment, dissemination of false information portraying plaintiffs as violent, street closures, confiscation of political materials, preemptive mass false arrests and seizures, and unnecessary lengthy detention of arrestees in inhumane conditions." This included
Stopping & frisking individual protesters without reasonable suspicion or consent.
Searched demonstration organizers or their vehicles without probable cause or consent
Making pretextual visits to demonstration organizers' places of residence.
Stopping demonstration organizers on the street, showing them photos taken of them, naming their associates, and otherwise making government surveillance known to them.
Massing large numbers of uniformed and non-uniformed officers near the Convergence Center and other places where activists met, and subjecting them to surveillance.
Infiltrating demonstrators' organizations and informal groups with agents posing as political activists.
Flying and hovering government helicopters at low altitudes over the Convergence Center and the residences and property of protesters.
Causing George Washington University to ban overnight guests in its dormitories during the period of the protests and prohibiting demonstrators from using GWU facilities promised to them.
Causing the American University to cancel an assembly and panel, including Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who was scheduled to speak on globalization, the World Bank and the IMF.
Causing the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to (1) close Metro Stations demonstrators were expected to use, and (2) prohibit passengers from carrying political banners and signs, which is customarily allowed.
All these actions were taken before a single demonstrator appeared on the streets (though some continued afterwards), and they represented a chilling intrusion into the private lives of activists, and into the normal functioning of civil society.
A decade ago tomorrow, the "Battle in Seattle" touched off a series of protests against corporate globalization and neoliberal ideology which meet with intense levels of political repression, police violence and massive media dysinformation. The wave of protests would not subside until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 provided a pretext for the much more hardline repression of neoconservatism to take over from its neoliberal predecessors.
Now, just over a year after the election of Barack Obama put an end to the neoconservative dominance--at least for now--it's a particularly apt moment to look back 10 years and see just what the neoliberal style of repression was like, and how it responded to a diverse coalition of actors calling for global justice. The kind of repression seen back then may help people newly activated in political struggle to better make sense of the perplexing continuities between the Bush and Obama eras.
Protests against the IMF, the World Bank and other global institutions are nothing new. But since most such protests--many involving tens or hundreds of thousands--have taken place outside the US and are routinely ignored by the corporate media, the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle late last year came as quite a surprise to most Americans.
The media and the police had no such excuse for their surprise. Unlike the American public at large, they had all the information beforehand and simply chose to ignore it. Demonstrations accompanied related events throughout the year, with scattered acts of violence at times despite organizers clear commitment to non-violence.
A New York Times article on October 13,1999 reported that, "[t]hree hundred groups are vowing to bring 50,000 people or more to downtown Seattle to picket, demonstrate, hold teach-ins and cause general disruption . . . that could turn the city's streets into a carnival of protest and, perhaps, a morass of gridlock." This was six weeks before the anti-WTO demonstrations took place. Both the Seattle police and the corporate media had plenty of warning, which they chose to ignore.
Protests against the IMF, the World Bank and other global institutions are nothing new. But since most such protests--many involving tens or hundreds of thousands--have taken place outside the US and are routinely ignored by the corporate media, the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle late last year came as quite a surprise to most Americans.
The media and the police had no such excuse for their surprise. Unlike the American public at large, they had all the information beforehand and simply chose to ignore it. Demonstrations accompanied related events throughout the year, with scattered acts of violence at times despite organizers clear commitment to non-violence.
A New York Times article on October 13,1999 reported that, "[t]hree hundred groups are vowing to bring 50,000 people or more to downtown Seattle to picket, demonstrate, hold teach-ins and cause general disruption . . . that could turn the city's streets into a carnival of protest and, perhaps, a morass of gridlock." This was six weeks before the anti-WTO demonstrations took place. Both the Seattle police and the corporate media had plenty of warning, which they chose to ignore.
The ACLU report, "Out of Control: Seattle's Flawed Response to Protests Against the World Trade Organization" (pdf) contains a timeline which makes the sequence of events abundantly clear. On November 30, the first day of scheduled WTO talks, police first showed up at 7 AM, after protesters had begun to arrive. Blocking intersections began by 8 AM, and by 10 AM only a handful of delegates had been able to enter the building where the opening procedures were then scheduled to take place.
This past Monday, a $13 million settlement was announced in a lawsuit over illegal arrests at protests in Washington DC in 2000 against the World Bank and the IMF meetings. But this description vastly understates the scope of repression of basic democratic rights that were involved, as do the very short news briefs from AP and By Agence France-Presse. The AFP story gives a hint of what was involved, stating:
"We think it's an historic settlement. It's the largest settlement for a protest case in Washington D.C. and we believe in the country," Partnership for Civil Justice, which filed the class action lawsuit, said in a statement.
The settlement after nine years of legal action was signed Monday and needs to be confirmed by the courts in the coming months, Partnership spokeswoman Mara Verheyden-Hilliard told AFP on Tuesday.
Around 680 demonstrators and some unsuspecting tourists and reporters were arrested in April 2000 during World Bank and IMF meetings in the US capital. The marches followed similar protests during a World Trade Organization meeting months earlier in Seattle, Washington state.
"Some of them were held on a bus with their hands tied behind their back for up to 12 hours. They were denied food, water, people were not allowed to go to the bathroom. People on the bus would be forced to urinate on themselves," the spokeswoman said.
None of the people arrested were charged. Verheyden-Hilliard said the police action as a "mass false arrest."
But it wasn't just a mass false arrest. It was a mass false following weeks of pre-emptive harassment and disruption of people intent on exercising their First Amendment rights. And the pre-emptive attacks on people's First Amendment rights had evolved over a period of months as a coordinated government practice--under President Bill Clinton--to stifle protests against global neoliberalism. These protests were part of series of related protests with a long history outside of the United States, but which had only become established here a few months earlier with the so-called "Battle In Seattle" which occurred in November, 1999, the 10th Anniversary of which is this coming Monday.
The "Battle in Seattle" touched off a series of protests against corporate globalization and neoliberal ideology which meet with intense levels of political repression, police violence and massive media disinformation--all of which was seemingly quite at odds with the neoliberal mythology that "free trade" was, in fact, an expression of "freedom" that purportedly abhored the sort of paramilitary force displayed and the arbitrary suspension of basic democratic rights, which were, in fact, necessary in order to defend the actually existing nature of neoliberal "freedom." It would be years before Naomi Klein would detail the contradictions involved in her book, The Shock Doctrine, but the stark contradiction of police repression in defense of "free trade" was fully visible in police repression of a series of major demonstrations in Canada and Europe as well as America over a period of almost two years.
The wave of protests touched off in Seattle would not subside until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 provided a pretext for the much more hardline repression of neoconservatism to take over from its neoliberal predecessors. However, the nature of the repressive tactics seen before 9/11 is but one of several lines of evidence that strongly suggests that there is much more in common between neoconservtism and neoliberalism than there is that divides them, despite the purported differences in their ideological justifications. This, in turn, may help to explain why the presidency of Barack Obama has begun to show much more striking signs of continuity with the Bush regime than the promised "change you can believe in" that Obama campaigned on.
While I will deal some of those continuities elsewhere this weekend (already begun with "Afghanistan: Obama vs. Martin Luther King "), in this diary, and two others to follow tomorrow, I will retell some of the story of what happened at Seattle and thereafter which shows the development of a repressive police/political/media apparatus during the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, at a period of time when the neocons were nowhere close to controlling the levers of power. I will be reprinting portions of a document I wrote for LA Independent Media Center in August 2000, just prior to the protests at the Democratic National Convention in LA, "The Empire Strikes Back: Police Repression of Protest From Seattle To L.A." Despite the subtitle, my concern was not solely police repression, but rather the way that it was deployed as part of a larger political plan to suppress basic democratic rights, in tandem with justifications and biased, even delusional reporting by the corporate media. The media coverage played an invaluable role in enabling the continuation, and even escalation of the political repression and police violence that was only cut off by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which opened the door for much higher level of political repression on a what appeared to be a completely different basis.
Now, just over a year after the election of Barack Obama put an end to the neoconservative dominance--at least for now--it's a particularly apt moment to look back 10 years and see just what the neoliberal style of repression was like, and how it responded to a diverse coalition of actors calling for global justice--a call that's re-emerging now in another form, the call for climate justice in dealing with global warming in a way that doesn't punish the poor people of the global South for the irresponsible development practices of the global north. The kind of repression seen back then may help people newly activated in political struggle to better make sense of the perplexing continuities between the Bush and Obama eras. This diary begings I am posting a series of three diaries based largely on excepts from "The Empire Strikes Back," this first one containing the entire introduction, a second one dealing with Battle in Seattle, and a third one dealing the DC World Bank/IMF protests that were the occasions for the arrests that resulted in the $13 million settlement announced on Monday.
